


Unseen, Like The Wind

by SecondStarfall (beantiger)



Series: The Second Starfall Stories [17]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Backstory, Childhood Trauma, Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Style, Fantasy, Flash Fic, Flowers, Gen, Magic, Microfic, Miracles, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Refugees, Running Away, Travel, Witches, Worldbuilding, You are filled with DETERMINATION
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22238881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beantiger/pseuds/SecondStarfall
Summary: Later in the night, the girl who loved flowers became wind again—walked, walked. She did not feel she had to forgive anyone, even if their apologies were sincere.***The travels of a young queer botanist.
Series: The Second Starfall Stories [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582975
Kudos: 9





	Unseen, Like The Wind

**Author's Note:**

> This is a version of the original Twitterfic, same title, posted over at my now-deactivated personal account in January 2020. It has been given minor edits for consistency with other stories and readability on AO3. ❤️
> 
>  **SUGGESTED RE-READING:** I think this stands alone? But we first meet the botanist in ["The Botanist's Most Important Failure."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21990349)
> 
> ✨ [[see the full SecStar timeline](https://secondstarfall.com/index.php/Official_Timeline) | [check out the SecStar wiki](https://secondstarfall.com/)] ✨

The woman who would become a royal botanist was once a girl in a faraway country. With turned shoulders, her parents transformed her into wind: unseen, unconsidered, except when she was particularly loud, and she never was.

So, like the wind, one day she carried herself far—she walked, and walked.

***

By the time the girl arrived at the witch’s cottage halfway across the land, her shoes were naught but strings of leather. In return for the girl’s room and board the witch drafted her as an apprentice. Spells and hexes and soul-binding she never learned, but the girl did come to understand how to cool the body with feverfew, and sedate with valerian. Every flower she adored as a friend.

One afternoon, however, as the girl did their wash in a nearby stream, the witch approached her with an arm outstretched. The girl who loved flowers recoiled at first, as the witch’s left arm was silvery in hue up to the elbow, shiny and taut. 

Then the witch touched her forehead. A piercing ache ran through the girl’s sinuses, her neck, her spine. She stumbled. Smoke had gathered around the witch in a dark aura—

When the witch, clothed in shadow, pulled her out of the stream, she lay her hand again on the girl’s forehead. The pain receded, as did the smoke.

“I'm so, so sorry, little one, sweet one, _kachaa,_ " said the witch. "I needed to know. And now I know. And now I can give the true sight back to everyone I stole it from.”

***

Later in the night, the girl who loved flowers became wind again—walked, walked. She did not feel she had to forgive anyone, even if their apologies were sincere.

Her body turned to stone. She subsisted on acorns and in the distant trenches of her mind, she realized just how at odds she would have been with her old country if she had stayed there. A mother? A wife to a man she did not know? No, no. How could she? But there was another place where no one would impose those laws on her, if she could just...

In the end the girl’s spirit—or whatever one might call the source of a child’s frighteningly deep determination—gave out. She crumpled into a field of aster, her consciousness drifting.

***

It was a miracle, some say, that the wind picked her up from that field and brought her to the kingdom where she would eventually reside. It was a miracle that there were so many violet petals in her hair the local watchfolk immediately noticed her exhausted body. It was a miracle that the watchfolk thought to bring her to the local Vagrant's Hospital, and not a prison. But the girl who loved flowers had never believed in miracles.

Just conviction, as unseen as wind.

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment or a kudos or whatever the heck if this tickled your fancy. There shall be more! ❤️ Also, please let me know what other characters, relationships, or places you'd like to hear about. I have lots of ideas, but I'd enjoy writing a few stories for y'all as well.
> 
> ✨ [[see the full SecStar timeline](https://secondstarfall.com/index.php/Official_Timeline) | [check out the SecStar wiki](https://secondstarfall.com/)] ✨
> 
>  **AUTHOR'S COMMENTARY:** Val's backstory came fully-fledged into my mind, and I knew what to write pretty much immediately. I also meant for Taaron—the witch—to have her own story. Just one. So we kind-of knew where she was coming from. (She's also the witch that's mentioned in ["A True History of True Sight,"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22097629) and pops up in the lives of many of our characters.) As it turned out, though, I had a lot to say about her, as you'll see in later tales.


End file.
